Sixty-six post-doctoral scholars from India will travel to Israel to pursue research at top universities

Sixty-six post-doctoral scholars from India will travel to Israel in the coming months to pursue research at top universities. The researchers will be sponsored by the government of Israel which has announced three-year scholarships grants for Indian scholars.

According to officials from Embassy of Israel, this is the first programme of its kind, bringing advanced Indian researchers to Israel in a wide range of topics.

In the framework of this scholarship programme, fellows from IIT Delhi, Osmania University, Universities of Delhi, Lucknow, Calcutta, Mumbai and other leading academic institution in India will conduct research in a wide variety of fields, including immunology, genetics, neurobiology, bio-informatics, computer sciences, law and economics.

The research will be undertaken at leading universities in Israel, namely, the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, the Technion - Israel Institute of Technology, Tel Aviv University, Haifa University, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, the Weizmann Institute of Science and the Open University of Israel.

Universities in Israel have continued to figure highly in global rankings, with three included in the top 100 universities of the world and a total of six among the top 500 as per 2011 data.

The post-doctoral scholarship initiative was conceived during the visit to India of Israel's finance minister, Yuval Steinitz, in December 2011. Steinitz had met the then HRD minister Kapil Sibal and the two pledged their support for bolstering Indo-Israel academic cooperation.

Attaching importance to ties between Israel and India, Israel's education minister, Gideon Saar and the chair of the Planning and Budgeting Committee of the Council for Higher Education in Israel, Manuel Trajtenberg, granted their full support for the initiative.

A call for research proposals for yet another round of this post-doctoral scholarship programme has already been announced. Applications can be submitted through Israeli universities.